I know that this is a car publication – and primarily a modified car publication – but forgive me if I digress.

As we’ve been covering in our series Building a Human Powered Vehicle, I have been making a recumbent trike. That is, a three wheeled, pedal-powered vehicle where the rider lies back at an angle and the pedals are relatively high up in front. My design uses full suspension (front double wishbones, front sway bar, rear trailing arm), is made from aluminium and uses a rear damper. It was inspired by the non-suspension Greenspeed series of trikes, of which I own one – the Greenspeed GTR.

Before building the trike, I knew very little about them – and very little about bicycle design as well. So, you might be thinking – what is there to know about bike design? Well, lots and lots. Things like gearing (crank length, front and rear cog sizes, gear ratios), steering (trail, castor), and of course frame design. With tadpole trikes, you can also add scrub radius, toe and Ackermann, and with a suspended trike, static and dynamic camber, anti-dive and so on.

Home builders of bikes and trikes have an extensive web presence, and while there are some simply horrible designs prominent, there are also some excellent engineering pages devoted to design. In fact, when I compare this scene with modified cars, in terms of uniqueness, engineering innovation and results, recumbent bikes and trikes show far more progressiveness than home builders and modifiers of cars. (The only home-built transport application which I think is even better can be found in experimental class aircraft.) Small, specialist engineering companies are also prominent in recumbent trike building.

Enough of the generalities – let’s look at a specific case.

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One aspect of the Web which is seldom acknowledged is that it can stifle creativity and development. Huh? But isn’t the Web a place that encourages self-expression, allowing free reign of ideas that were once suppressed? Well, kind of. The trouble is that anyone with an innovative approach (that is, by definition one that has not been widely adopted previously) is likely to be ridiculed for it; to be told that it won’t work.

I’ve seen this happen in car modification many times, and in fact twice just this week.

Both were in discussion groups: that frequent scourge of progress. The first was in a Porsche discussion group. As I have said before, I don’t regularly read many discussion groups but I still get to see a lot by reading the AutoSpeed referrers’ listing. This listing shows the web pages that readers of our articles have come from – and these are often discussion groups. Someone in the Porsche group referenced one of our articles on the over-boost canister (see Killing Wastegate Creep) and asked if this would work on Porsches.

All the answers were negative: nope, it wouldn’t work; it was just like another type of boost control; it would cause boost spikes (duh!); it was of no benefit. Firstly, few if any of the respondents had actually read the article in any detail. Secondly, none (not one!) understood the purpose of the approach. And thirdly, the use of an over-boost canister will of course work on any turbo car – and its affect can be easily adjusted to suit personal preference or turbo/engine characteristics.

But the original poster gained from the group responses the idea that the approach was of no benefit.

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I write this after completing two 750-kilometre drives, each done in a day. The occasion was the wedding of some friends, and the location was the Rydges resort at Yeppoon, on the coast near Rockhampton in Queensland. My wife and son flew up from the Gold Coast where we live; I decided to drive.

The car was my 1-litre, three cylinder hybrid Honda Insight. But isn’t that a long drive for a little car? Perhaps – but so what? There’s plenty of cabin space (in fact, with the seat adjusted correctly, my left foot can barely reach the firewall) and I don’t have any problems with driving a low-powered car on the open road. In this era of very powerful base model Australian cars, people tend to forget that safety on the highway is much more dependent on driving skill than the acceleration available under the right foot. I didn’t have any problems overtaking a few semi-trailers or climbing hills at the speed limit – and I saw lots of very powerful cars that had near misses, simply through appalling driving.

The only changes I made to the car for the trip were to inflate the tyres to 37 psi (hot) and fill the tank with 98 octane fuel. I think as a result of one or both of these, fuel economy was even better than standard. Well, it would have been if I hadn’t run the air con for about 80 per cent of the time….

After resetting the trip computer fuel economy display at home, my first stop (the petrol station to fill the tank) showed a fuel economy of 2.2 litres/100km (most of the trip to the petrol station is downhill), followed by 2.7 litres/100km at the Gateway Bridge and 3.2 litres/100km at Gympie. Following that, I turned on the air and the road also became hillier: the consumption average then steadily rose to 3.5 litres/100km where it stayed for the rest of the trip, including the full return journey.

As I have said many times before of this car: that’s world’s best fuel economy.

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At AutoSpeed we don’t do a helluva lot on DIY car sound.

At AutoSpeed, we do a lot on car sound.

Contradictory? Not really: since we’ve done near 3000 stories, even those topics that we cover rarely still have a good few stories available. And this week it’s the topic of DIY car sound that’s been swirling around in my mind.

I’ve bought a new (secondhand) car – a Honda Insight – and fitted a JVC DVD/CD/AM/FM head unit. As a temporary expedient, I’ve simply connected the JVC to the four standard Honda speakers. These are single cone, nominally 6 inch units positioned in the two doors and in the rear bulkhead behind which the battery and control electronics for this hybrid car are situated.

Like most OE units, the Honda speakers’ efficiency is high and so the power output of the head unit is sufficient for my SPL needs. But the lack of bass and treble are obvious. (Interestingly, with the ability of the JVC to allow you to set individual speaker levels down to 1dB and also set distances from the listener to each of the speakers, the imaging and sound stage are fine. It’s just the lack of highs and lows.)

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Jeez, I feel stuffed. My back aches, my legs hurt, my hands are sore with little cuts and bruises and – despite having had a shower – I still feel grimy.

But I’m pleased with what I achieved.

This has been an unusual week. In one respect it’s been sad (the cat we’ve had for 12 years had to be put down); in another respect strange (I abruptly resigned from contributing to Silicon Chip, a magazine I’ve been associated with for 14 years); and in another respect puzzling (a former colleague chose to embark on what I consider to be an odd career move). But the upshot of all this is that I’ve had both more time available than normal and I’ve simultaneously felt the urge to concentrate on Getting Physical Things Done.

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Colleague Michael Knowling and I have a standing joke. If we’re photographing a modified car and the car starts with a whir-whir-whir-brmmmm!, we know it’s got programmable management. If it starts with a whir-brmmmm!, we know it’s got factory management. Perhaps it’s modified factory management, but factory management all the same. It may not be impossible to give a car good starting in all conditions with programmable management, but the reality is that this very rarely occurs.

And it’s the same with many other characteristics of factory engine management systems – aftermarket programmable management systems are simply out of their depth in providing stuff fitted to pretty well all current cars, even the cheapies. What stuff, then? Well, things like electronic throttle control, traction control, stability control, auto trans control, variable camshaft timing control, changeover intake manifold control… Sure, there are programmable management systems around that can perform some of these functions (electronic throttle control for example) but the bottom line is that they do so only in a far cruder way than factory systems. Basically, they don’t have the required number of software maps or the development those entail.

I said all of this four years ago – yes, four bloody years ago! – in The Re-Invention of Engine Management Modification and now some of the formerly greatest advocates of programmable engine management systems are starting to see the light. Simon Gischus of Melbourne workshop Nizpro was the most enthusiastic fan of MoTeC engine management systems I have ever seen… bar of course MoTeC itself. Mr Gischus would have nothing to do with factory management tweaking, describing such an approach as being massively inferior to his beloved MoTeC systems. Being geographically located close to MoTeC and having excellent chassis and engine dyno equipment, he was also instrumental in pushing MoTeC forwards in programmable engine management features.

But – and this is just as I said in 2002 – the advent of the turbo BA Falcon changed that. The VL Turbo that Nizpro once specialised in was by then becoming geriatric; the BA Falcon offered a whole new parade of tuning work that would stretch ahead at least ten years. But there was no way Nizpro could compete with other Falcon tuners by putting MoTeC on the cars. Not in cost and, as it turned out, not in results either. (Mr Gischus once took us for a ride in a MoTeC-equipped BA turbo – he wouldn’t let us drive it. The car idled badly and its performance was nothing wonderful.)

Nizpro then tried the ChipTorque-produced Xede interceptor but in the car we drove, achieved dreadful results. (See Cobra Kitted XR6T.) About that three things must be said. Firstly, we’ve driven ChipTorque’s own Xede-equipped BA Turbo and it was fine. Secondly, the APS turbo Falcons we’ve driven drove perfectly, despite using the Unichip interceptor. Finally, Nizpro’s tuning experience had previously all been with programmable management systems: tuning an interceptor (which is basically fooling the ECU into adopting change) can be a very different thing.

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Every so often we at AutoSpeed get sent some free items. Recently, book publisher Veloce has been sending books, and a few months ago Valvoline sent a sample of a new car wax called Eagle One Nanowax.

Most media have a ‘news’ or ‘new products’ page where stuff like this can be displayed but we don’t have either of those – all our articles are full length. So while the books have been reviewed either singly or in pairs as articles, I’ve been a bit unsure of what to do with the wax. After all, who is going to read a 1000 word feature article where some wax is applied to a car? Not me, that’s for sure.

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When I think back to all the cars I have owned, appearance was always near the bottom of the list.

My first car – a tiny 1973 Honda Z – was the only one available on my limited student budget and came courtesy of my mother. My first real car – a ’77 AlfaSud – was bought because at the time, it was regarded as one of the best handling cars around. My next car – a ’77 BMW 3.0si – was regarded by some as the very best sedan in the world, and the next (while regarded by most as nowhere near the best car in the world!) had better steering, a smoother engine and much better NVH than the BMW. It was a 1986 Holden VL Commodore Turbo.

The Commodore was replaced by a Liberty RS, the Liberty by an R32 Nissan Skyline GTR, the GTR by an Audi S4, the S4 by a Lexus LS400, the LS400 by a tiny Honda Insight.

Yep, full circle.

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Over the years I’ve built and written about plenty of hand-cranked LED torches. The articles have appeared in Silicon Chip magazine (see Our Fantastic Human-Powered LED Torches for an example) and in addition to those covered in the articles, I’ve built plenty of other torches for personal use. But now commercial hand-cranked LED torches have become available – and some of them are very good.

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